Legend has it that in 1630, a “romping girl” named Anne Pollard was the first colonial woman to set foot in the new settlement of Boston. Whether Anne was first or not, she definitely stayed for quite a while—she died there in 1725 at the age of 104, leaving behind 130 descendants. In the years between, she married, opened a tavern with her husband, and later ran it herself as a widow. As Anne grew older and older, she became a local celebrity, and a lucky visitor who dropped into the tavern might be invited to share a “social pipe” with the city’s most famous matriarch. If you visit Boston Common today, you can find a young Anne depicted on the Founders Memorial.
Her story is a useful reminder that while early American settlers did not generally live as long as we do now, some of them did get to be very old. Of the women who managed to reach 21 in the late-seventeenth-century Plymouth Colony, about 7 percent made it past 90. You just had to be very, very lucky. Today, aging tends to be a rather confident progression through childhood, young adulthood, and into middle age, at which point we might begin to seriously contemplate our own mortality. In the colonial period, death could come at any time—infants died, children died, teenagers died. Young women died in childbirth; young men were lost at sea. Houses—and towns—caught fire. Plagues and epidemic diseases appeared and whisked away hundreds of people of all ages.
In 1632, the 19-year-old Massachusetts poet Anne Bradstreet wrote “Upon a Fit of Sickness”:
Twice ten years old, not fully told
Since nature gave me breath
My race is run, my thread is spun
Lo here is fatal Death.
Bradstreet lived to be 60, but clearly she took her era’s worldview to heart.
If New Englanders had a shaky life expectancy, it was absolutely nothing compared to the situation in the early southern colonies, where, thanks to the malarial swamps, mortality rates before 1624 ran as high as 37 percent. The upside was that women who did manage to survive had a raft of opportunities. Their tenure as prime marriage candidates could stretch out until menopause. “If any Maid or single Woman have a desire to go over, they will think themselves in the Golden Age, when Men paid a Dowry for their Wives: for if they be but Civil, and under 50 years of Age, some honest Man or other, will purchase them for their Wives,” wrote one English promoter who was trying to encourage emigration. This open attitude toward age on the part of the male population had a lot to do with the fact that there was only one woman for every six men.
The southern colonies were an excellent example of an important rule in American history: when there aren’t enough people, outsiders who wouldn’t normally get a chance to shine are suddenly in demand. If you were a middle-aged black woman in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, your work options were probably limited to doing laundry or somebody else’s household chores. However, if you were a black pioneer in the West, you could own the only bar in town or be the stagecoach driver.
If you were Margaret Brent in seventeenth-century Maryland, you could step up and save your colony. Brent was described as a large woman with red hair, and that’s all the help we’re going to get in imagining her. The fact that she never married was so unusual for the time and place that many scholars have concluded she had taken a religious vow of celibacy. But she certainly did not seem to shun all worldly goods. She threw herself into the business of lending money to the newer settlers and spent much of her middle age in court, suing her fellow colonists 134 times, mainly for debt repayment. She generally won. That’s why she’s referred to—rather loosely—as America’s first female lawyer. Maryland’s governor was so impressed that he made her executrix of his estate. Later, when mercenary soldiers were threatening to level the colony, the dying governor put her in charge of restoring the peace. She did—by raising enough money to bribe everybody to go away.
Since Brent was a unique figure, it’s tricky to give her story any universal meaning—other than the one about desperate times breeding desperate measures. (The Maryland Assembly said that during its crisis the colony was safer “in her hands than in any man[’]s.” But they still refused to allow her to have a vote.) Most women who came to the early south had less dramatic stories. Mainly they were just hoping to make a good marriage. Given the bad water, bad air, and overall miasma of the place, the chances were slim that they’d live long enough to enjoy it. But the matrimonial odds were so favorable that a woman in good health could just keep marrying up. Frances Culpeper wed a large landowner in what is now North Carolina when she was 18. He died, and Frances inherited most of his property. The now-wealthy widow was soon remarried—this time to Sir William Berkeley, the governor of Virginia. Frances, 36, was now Lady Berkeley and equipped with a sizable guaranteed income for life. About a decade and many adventures later, Lord Berkeley died from the effects of a bout with malaria. Frances was married again, at 46, to a younger man who became governor of the Carolinas. But she was always known as Lady Berkeley.
Life for women in the northern colonies was much… calmer. New arrivals found the climate and living conditions healthier than in the crowded, sewage-swamped cities of Europe they’d left behind. And the women who did make it to middle age and beyond sometimes concluded that older was better. “I have often thought that women who live to get over the time of Child-bareing, if other things are favourable to them, experience more comfort and satisfaction than at any other period of their lives,” wrote Elizabeth Drinker in her diary. She was 61 at the time, and she had lived an action-packed life. Her husband, Henry, a Philadelphia businessman, had been exiled during the Revolutionary War as a suspected Tory sympathizer. Elizabeth made her way to Valley Forge in 1778 to plead his case to George Washington—who offered a good dinner but not much assistance. Eventually reunited with Henry, she later nursed her household through a terrible yellow fever epidemic that took nearly 10 percent of Philadelphia’s population.
Drinker was wealthier than most colonial women of her time, but the rhythms of her life were typical. She married in her 20s, bore children until middle age, and was still raising her brood when her oldest offspring began to have families of their own. Even when the children left the house, most of them continued to live nearby, and her life was full of domestic duties and babies. There was no real empty nest, just a slightly calmer one. And you could see how, after nine deliveries and two miscarriages, she might have regarded aging as something of a picnic.
Elizabeth Drinker would live into her 70s, but like everyone in the colonies, she understood how quickly death could strike people of any age—only four of her nine children would survive her. Given the poor chances of living for a very long time, old people were often regarded as having been singled out by the Creator as particularly worthy. “If a man is favored with long life… it is God that has lengthened his days,” said Boston minister Increase Mather, who made it to 84 himself. One Massachusetts congregation, whose 1682 seating plan still exists, made the status of seniority perfectly clear. The best seat, next to the pulpit, went to the minister’s wife, and the one next to her was reserved for the widow of the previous minister. Then came the elders, and the elders’ wives, and the widows of elders. (A woman could be old in Massachusetts, but she couldn’t be an elder.) Then came the congregation, which was divided by gender and seated according to age, with the youngest members consigned to the rear. The church was the center of life in those communities. If you were an older woman wondering if you still had a place in the scheme of things, it must have been hugely reassuring to walk into Sunday service and stride up the aisle, past your younger relatives and neighbors, and take an honored seat near the front.
As we’ve seen, a woman of 50 might count as an extremely desirable marriage prospect if she happened to live in a very high-mortality region. Even in the healthier north, when it came to sex in general, male opinions on the perfect age for a partner varied. Benjamin Franklin, the ultimate pragmatist, wrote a famous letter to a young friend, counseling him that if he intended to have affairs, he should prefer “old Women to young ones.” They were more interesting, Franklin argued, and anyway “in the dark all Cats are grey.”
We will pause for a moment to consider whether that was a compliment.
No specific milestone signified passage into old age among colonial women. By 40, many had already lost a husband and offspring. Many 60-year-olds were still raising their children—the average housewife was 63 when her youngest left home. Every woman who was capable of lifting a finger was expected to take part in household chores. And nobody was going to tell you to slow down because your hair was getting white.
Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife, spent her life balancing her job delivering babies with a mind-boggling list of domestic duties: spinning, knitting, sewing, preparing the family food, tending chickens and sheep. Around 1800, as she approached her 70s, she began to cut back; but then the other local midwife died and Ballard stepped up. At 77 she was still answering late-night calls that could drag on well into the next day. (“The patient was safe delivered at 3 hour pm of her fifth son. I tarried all night.”) On another occasion, after mother and child had been cared for, Ballard took a nap, had some breakfast with the family, rode on to visit another patient, and then came home to do “my ironing and some mending.” Besides delivering babies, she prepared bodies for burial and visited the sick, sometimes dispensing medicines of her own making. She reached her clients mainly by horse, crossing rivers and traversing bad or nonexistent roads in Maine weather. She wrote about climbing “mountains of ice” on one expedition and falling from her horse into the mud during another. There were other midwives who probably performed just as heroically. On Long Island, Lucretia Lester was said to have delivered 1,300 babies and lost only two. We really don’t know if Ballard was particularly unusual. She just happened to be the one who kept a diary.
As long as midwives were needed, nobody objected to their riding around the countryside in the middle of the night at any age. The same was true of every occupation where competent workers were in short supply. Elizabeth Drinker was fitted for a new dress by a seamstress named Susannah Swett and wrote happily: “I believe I never had a gown better made in my life and she is now within seven weeks of 73 years of age.” But just because the colonists were ready to hire the elderly for a job that needed doing, it didn’t mean that prejudices didn’t exist. Drinker added that the surprise of seeing someone “work so neatly at such an age is the cause of my making the memorandum.”
Ministers urged their aging female parishioners to achieve serenity by contemplating death as the passage to a far happier life in heaven. (When the clergyman Mather Byles passed away, his daughter announced she was “in rapture” over his good fortune.) While they waited, women were supposed to gradually withdraw from the world, spending more and more time in prayer and contemplation while enjoying earthly pleasures less and less—but still, of course, continuing to perform the household chores. In Boston, Rev. Benjamin Colman preached that it was the duty of “aged women” to repress their discontents and “be in Behaviour as becometh Holiness.” This was especially important, he said, when it came to “Publick Appearance & Conversation; Garb, Dress, Gate, Countenance, Speech, Silence, Gesture”—a list that pretty much swept the board except for the aforementioned housework.
Plenty of reports from colonial days make it clear that women of every age ignored the ministers when it came to staying silent. But they did adapt their dress to their time of life. Most women lived on farms, wearing simple, loose dresses that were easy to work in. As they aged, they generally began to avoid bright colors and don close-fitting caps. The public message was pretty clear: the cap wearers were out of the marriage market and putting away their plumage. But they were also covering the signs of graying hair. It was stage one in an ongoing struggle that would proceed, over the next few centuries, through false curls, turbans, wigs, and every other method of concealment women could concoct. When we look at portraits of them wearing their dark dresses and caps, they often seem to be nothing but somber faces floating in the dark.
Things were a lot less dreary in the fashionable world of high society. Gray hair was actually in—it was a symbol of dignity and importance. But the idea was not to flaunt your own gray locks. You wore a large, dramatic gray wig. Maria and Harriet Trumbull, teenage sisters who reported back to their Connecticut family on the fashions of New York in 1801, sent their mother a white wig, telling her that the women in society “wear white hair altogather now.” There could be nothing less fashionable, they warned, “than a black wig.”
Women applied bacon to their faces to avoid wrinkles, or used a paste made from eggs and alum boiled in rosewater. Tactics of that kind were socially acceptable, as long as the family could spare the bacon and eggs. But the revolutionary era regarded cosmetics as… un-American—a sinister trick to trap unwary males into marriage with women who were older, or less attractive, than they appeared. When Americans were under British rule, some people apparently believed that cosmetics were illegal and that women who “impose upon, seduce or betray into matrimony any of his Majesty’s subjects by virtue of scents, cosmetics, washes, paints, artificial teeth, false hair or high-heeled shoes, shall incur the penalty of the law now in force against witchcraft.” Stories about “Hoops and Heels” laws pop up all over our early history. It’s not clear that one was ever passed, and none ever seems to have been enforced. But the sentiment certainly existed.
Teeth were a problem for older colonists of both sexes—although there’s no record of any legislature trying to punish men for wearing artificial dentures when they were courting. There was no dentistry as we know it. Barbers and mechanics were sometimes called in to treat rotten teeth, but their only remedy was to pull them. (Paul Revere, a goldsmith, also practiced a little dental work on the side.) The toothbrush had been invented, but the early versions were generally made of hog bristles, which were very expensive. Toothpaste didn’t become widely used until the late 1800s, and if a colonial woman did try to clean her teeth, the process involved a coarse linen cloth and, occasionally, a mixture of honey and sugar to theoretically wipe away decay.
If you lived into adulthood in colonial America you probably would not, alas, have all your teeth. And the number you could hang on to obviously dropped with age. Researchers excavating the site of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia discovered the body of a woman in early middle age who had only five teeth. Some of the others had been gone so long by the time of her death that the tooth sockets had completely closed over. Jamestown was notoriously a tough place to live—malnutrition was so bad that legend had it one settler was tried for having eaten his wife. But even when times got easier and food was plentiful, the dental situation didn’t much improve. “The women are pitifully tooth-shaken, whether through the coldness of the climate or by sweet-meats, of which they have a score, I am not able to affirm,” a visitor reported.
George Washington had famously bad teeth and ill-fitting dentures. Martha seemed to be in better shape. She had lost some of hers by the White House years and was wearing a kind of bridge, but it must have worked—Abigail Adams reported that the First Lady’s teeth were “beautiful.” Very few people were wealthy enough to acquire false teeth of any type, and the average colonial woman was forced to live with a premature look of toothless old age. Eyeglasses were expensive, too—and a luxury that women doing close sewing by candle at night must have yearned for. Both George and Martha Washington wore glasses by the end of their lives. But when Dolley Madison needed help reading or sewing, she shared a pair with her husband the president.
Women talked a lot about their ailments and physical disorders, which were legion. “To be old in early America was to be wracked by illness. It was to live in physical misery, with pain as a constant companion,” writes David Hackett Fischer. Anne Bradstreet was subject to fainting spells that could leave her unconscious for hours—one of her later poems was titled “Deliverance from a Fitt of Fainting.” Elizabeth Drinker’s diary is a veritable catalogue of symptoms, from fevers to “giddiness in my head, occasion’d by the obstruction in my bowels.” When she was 60, Drinker wrote that since she was feeling poorly almost all the time, she wasn’t going to mention health matters. If she were being less discreet, she added, “I should daily say I was unwell.”
“Dyspepsia”—an umbrella term for the many varieties of indigestion—was a near-universal complaint, and it’s no wonder, given the unsanitary conditions under which food was slaughtered and cooked. It was almost always accompanied by “peevishness, doubts, fears, wandering thoughts and ridiculous fancies,” claimed Benjamin Waterhouse, a late-eighteenth-century physician who was among the first faculty members at Harvard Medical School.
Elizabeth Drinker’s ideas about remedies sound more hair-raising than her symptoms. She attempted to cure her daughter of what Drinker described as “worms” by dosing her with “Venice Treacle,” a concoction whose five dozen ingredients included alcohol, opium, and honey. Bleeding was a favorite prescription. It was based on an ancient theory that physical distress was produced by too much blood in the system. Or the wrong kind. The real attraction was probably just that it was something the doctor could do, to look as if he had a plan. If a patient was complaining of back pain from rheumatism, for instance, the doctor might use a “scarificator” that pushed 15 or 20 small blades into her back to reduce the amount of blood. Drinker, when she was troubled with constipation, mused that “loosing blood might be a temporary relief” and later reported feeling “very languid” after having “lost, at least 12 ounces blood.” Unlike most of her contemporaries, she had recourse to a physician, although it’s hard to say if that did her much good, given all that bloodletting.
In an age without aspirin, let alone antibiotics, people of both sexes suffered from many ailments we can cure today with a pill or at least simple surgery. Benjamin Franklin, who had a bladder stone, said that only the use of opium made life “tolerable.” Women were also tormented by damage from childbirth that would be easily repairable today. In the nineteenth century, the famous abolitionist orator Angelina Grimké had what her husband called “injuries” that “shattered incurably her nervous system.” The problems apparently included a hernia and a prolapsed uterus—the latter so dire that her uterus sometimes protruded from her body, causing intense pain. Perhaps the worst nonfatal childbirth damage involved a tear in the wall between the vagina and the bladder or rectum, leaving victims unable to control a constant leakage of urine or feces. They were usually doomed to live confined to their rooms, permanently uncomfortable and treated like pariahs because of the stench.
No one in the eighteenth century could cure those problems, but when it came to the ordinary ailments of day-to-day life, it was usually the oldest woman in the family who had the remedy. A newlywed bride would probably arrive at her first home knowing the basics. But when the baby had a cough or her husband was tortured by those ever-present bowel issues, she would seek advice from her mother or an older neighbor. The same thing was true if a chicken failed to produce eggs or the bread didn’t rise. Women who had spent their lives as homemakers retained influence as they aged because they knew things. The list of skills a farm wife had to master was endless: spinning thread, weaving cloth, churning butter, making everything from candles to cheese to soap to sausage.
Women produced so many valuable products that they could run a parallel economic universe, bartering and trading their goods. They also had their own informal social system in which the older women were expected to advise their juniors. In 1664 in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Perkins and Agnes Ewens were called to court to testify in a case involving a younger woman they knew. But they declined to appear, arguing that they had counseled the person in question and did not want to break the confidence, since she had followed their advice and done well ever since. They were asking for a kind of “professional immunity,” and they received it.
Esther Lewis, who was widowed at 42, was an excellent—if somewhat over-the-top—example of older women’s influence and power. In the early nineteenth century, she ran the family’s 150-acre Pennsylvania farm by herself until she was in her 60s, and in her diary she records churning 288 pounds of butter in one year, with a plan to increase production the next. She supervised the drying of apples, making of applesauce, rendering of lard, and the production of about 1,000 candles a year for the household. She also educated her four daughters, sheltered runaway slaves, and—when she happened to notice some unusual stones on the ground—figured out that her land contained iron ore and established a successful mining operation. Esther apparently inherited this gift for overachievement. Her mother, Rebecca, moved to her daughter’s farm at 79 and took on the job of spinning yarn. She produced about 33,000 yards a year.
We don’t know nearly enough about black women of any age in the colonies. Almost all of them first arrived as slaves or indentured servants, who could eventually work out their term of service and become free. Children of mixed race born in the colonies usually took their status from their mothers. That was the story for Jenny Slew, who was born in 1719, the daughter of a free white woman and a male slave. Her parents were apparently able to live as husband and wife, and Jenny was raised free. As far as we know, she lived her life in quiet anonymity. (There was undoubtedly some private domestic drama since she went through several husbands.) Then, when she was 46, a white man named John Whipple kidnapped her “with force and arms” and tried to keep her as his slave. Jenny filed suit and demanded her freedom. Whipple’s defense was that Jenny, as a married woman, had no right to go to court on her own. A husband was supposed to represent her. The judge found that argument perfectly reasonable and Whipple won the case, giving us an excellent insight into why so many of the women who would fight for abolition in the next century also added their own rights to the agenda.
Undeterred, Jenny appealed. This time she got a trial by jury and she won, gaining both her freedom and a financial judgment against Whipple. She then left the courtroom and walked out of history—sort of. One of the lawyers present in the Salem courthouse when the verdict came down was John Adams. “Attended Court,” he wrote later. “Heard the trial of an action of trespass, brought by a mulatto woman, for damages, for restoring her liberty. This is called suing for liberty; the first action that ever I knew of the sort, though I have heard there have been many.” This was in 1765. Fourteen years later, Adams would begin work on the Massachusetts State Constitution, drafting a declaration of rights that stated “all men are born free and equal.” In 1780, it became state law.
In 1781, the new constitution caught the attention of Mum Bett, a slave of about 35 who was living in Massachusetts under an abusive mistress—Bett had once stopped the woman from hitting her younger sister with a shovel and wound up getting hit herself, with a deep wound to her arm. Bett got a young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick, who filed suit, arguing that her enslavement was unconstitutional. They won, paving the way for the state’s official abolition of slavery in 1783. After her victory, Bett took a new name and became, appropriately enough, Elizabeth Freeman. She took a job with the Sedgwick family, serving as a surrogate mother for the children when Sedgwick’s wife plunged into illness and depression. She saved her wages, bought land, and built a home of her own, where she lived in retirement. When she died, at 85, she was buried in the Sedgwick family plot under a tombstone that noted: “She could neither read nor write, yet in her own sphere she had no superior or equal. She neither wasted time nor property. She never violated a trust, nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial, she was the most efficient helper and the tenderest friend. Good mother, farewell.”
All the roads to power and prestige we’ve looked at were private—older women got to sit near the minister but not be the minister. They might be consulted for advice, but they were never elected to office. There were, of course, exceptions—the one rule to which there is no exception is that there will always be exceptions. A few early colonial women did become preachers and theologians, like the famous Anne Hutchinson of Massachusetts, who one observer said “preaches better Gospell than any of your black-coates that have been at the Ninneversity.” But Hutchinson was probably not a role model for many younger women unless they were prepared to be jailed, tried on multiple charges, convicted, and banished to Rhode Island while still in their 40s. And then to be widowed, moved to what is now the Bronx, and massacred in an Indian attack at 52.
A more optimistic example might have been the Quakers, who did manage some division of authority between the sexes. But if people really wanted to see older women triumph in a public role, they needed to look at Native Americans—which, unfortunately, very few of them ever did. In 1789, a young woman named Ann Powell kept a diary of an adventurous trip she and some relatives undertook from Montreal to Detroit. After stopping at Niagara Falls, Powell and her party were invited to watch an Iroquois council meeting, in which the participants included “some old squaws.” She was struck by the women’s influence. When a man in her own culture grew infirm and senile, she mused, people described him as an “old woman.” With the Iroquois, things seemed to be different. “On the banks of Lake Erie a woman becomes respectable as she grows old, and I suppose the greatest compliment you can pay a young hero is that he is as wise as an old woman,” she wrote.
The Iroquois, like many other eastern tribes, divided their labor: women grew most of the food while men hunted for protein. The basic form of government was the clan—an extended family in which the older women chose which man would be chief, and had the power to remove him if he failed to meet with their approval. “Nothing is more real than this superiority of women,” one French visitor wrote.
While older women continued to have an active part in tribal life long after the arrival of the Europeans, they were as affected as everyone else by the newcomers. By the time Ann Powell visited the Iroquois council and recorded her impressions, their way of living was already under attack. Native hunting land had been usurped by colonial farmers, and many of the tribes found themselves confined to reservations. Missionaries were uncomfortable with the traditional division of labor because it did not reflect their conviction that men were meant to enjoy the status of provider while women performed backup jobs like cooking and sewing and making cloth. Over the years, the American government would make repeated attempts to foist spinning wheels on the tribes, the better to nudge the women toward a proper place.
White incursion was catastrophic, not least because it also often meant the introduction of liquor. Handsome Lake, a Seneca leader, went into an alcoholic delirium in 1799 and had a vision in which the Creator revealed he was angry about four evils: whiskey, witchcraft, love magic, and abortions. All but the first appeared to be the doing of women, particularly the senior women. Handsome Lake declared that God wanted the Seneca to live in nuclear families, not matrilineal clans, and was also unhappy that the women taught their daughters how to use birth control: “The Creator is sad because of the tendency of old women to breed mischief.” Most of his targets were allowed to repent. But one refused to cooperate and demanded that Handsome Lake tell her exactly what she had done wrong. He ordered his followers to kill her, and they did. The witch hunt continued, but the rest of the alleged witches figured out that a quick request for his absolution would get them off the hook, and they successfully begged forgiveness.
Handsome Lake was not the only person who connected older women with witchcraft. In 1646, an English writer had deplored the way in which “every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furr’d brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue, having a ragged coate on her back, a skull cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, and a Dog or Cat by her side, is not only suspected but pronounced for a witch.” That was actually a lot of specificity—in the colonies, people seemed prepared to act on a far shorter checklist. During the last half of the seventeenth century, as many as 200 people were officially accused as witches in New England, and they ranged from Ann Hibbins, a wealthy Boston widow who had a history of fighting with workmen over their bills, to a number of cranky beggar women. Many of the victims had less than cherubic personalities, although in Salem the witch-hunters accused 71-year-old Rebecca Nurse, a respected member of the community, pulling her out of her sickbed and off to jail, trial, and hanging, all within four months. Most of the accused were older women, and the accusers were often in their teens. “Must the younger Women, do yee say, hearken to the Elder?” one of the Salem girls demanded of a “spectre” she claimed was torturing her.
Both the colonists and the Indians seemed to agree that one sign of possible witch-like tendencies was an older woman who lived alone. This was no short-term prejudice—in 1820, the census of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, reported only two households with a single inhabitant. One, a spinster, was “old Moll Garfield the witch.” The other, a man, was just listed as “an insane person.” If a widow wanted to avoid solitude, she generally wound up living with her adult children, and in the colonies, where many farmhouses consisted of a single dark room, that must have been less than convenient. Most early homes also had only one chair, which was reserved for the head of the household. The widowed mother would presumably have been confined to a stool. Even as time went on and houses got bigger, the chances were that in all but the wealthiest families the only real bedroom would belong to the parents. Grandmothers would likely sleep in a chamber with the children. Or with other female relatives who might have come to live for a while and help with the chores. Or maybe with everybody. Frequently families just set aside one large room where everyone slept, piled up on various mats.
Life in an average colonial home wasn’t all that comfortable for anyone, but it must have been particularly tough on older people. Even if a family was wealthy enough to avoid sleeping on the floor, the bedding situation wasn’t designed for back support. Feather beds were regarded as the height of luxury, but they were terrible in hot weather. They were also so high that they required stairs to mount them. One Massachusetts woman remembered dreading the arrival of morning and the necessity of climbing down from her huge, fluffy feather bed. And at night, unless she happened to hit the mattress just right, she “passed my night in rolling down hill, or in vain efforts to scramble to the top, to avoid falling out on the floor.”
Women who still had their husbands in old age usually continued to live independently, able to make their own choices on issues like floor versus feathers. But the story of the colonial era is frequently about widows. Nearly every woman married sooner or later—particularly in the 1600s and particularly in the south, where that shortage of females made spinsterhood almost an affront. “An old maid is one of the most cranky, ill-natured, maggoty, peevish, conceited, disagreeable, hypocritical, fretful, noisy, gibing, canting, censorious, out-of-the-way, never-to-be-pleased, good for nothing creatures,” hyperventilated a North Carolina paper. The antipathy was not so intense in the north, where the balance of the sexes was more even. (This is not to say it was nonexistent. A newspaper in 1790 called a spinster a “putrid abomination to the deity.”) At any rate, the vast majority of women did marry, and a very large proportion of them went on to survive their husbands. One eighteenth-century census in Massachusetts found widows outnumbering widowers seven to one.
Colonial widows had a public image of fragility. This may be because women who found themselves in need of assistance knew they were more likely to get it if they depicted themselves as rather pathetic creatures. After the Revolution, when Tory sympathizers in America appealed to the king of England for restoration of some of their confiscated properties, men described themselves as “unfortunate,” while women tended to say they were “poor, helpless” widows. The distinctly nonpathetic writer Judith Sargent Murray yearned for the day when “the term, helpless widow, might be rendered as unfrequent and inapplicable as that of helpless widower.”
Many widows were the furthest thing from miserable or needy. Some took new husbands—in the early south, it became a kind of career. But there were definite advantages to avoiding remarriage. Most of the colonies followed English law, under which married women had virtually no legal rights. Their husbands controlled their property, their income if they had any, and—at least in theory—their behavior. As the British jurist William Blackstone famously put it, under the law a married couple was one person, and that person was the husband. A widow, on the other hand, could do what she pleased, if she had the income with which to do it. Some, like Anne Pollard, wound up running the family business. While innkeeping and tailoring were both regarded as offshoots of housewives’ natural duties, colonial women showed up in less expected places, too. Ann Franklin, Ben Franklin’s sister-in-law, became the first woman printer in New England when she took over the family business after her husband’s death. Ann, about 39 at the time, had five children to support, and she built a prosperous establishment, which produced everything from books to election ballots. Her son, James, eventually came on as her business partner. But when he died, Ann, at 66, continued on her own. Lydia Bailey, a Philadelphia widow, had a 53-year publishing career during which she trained 42 men in the trade.
Some male colonists complained about a “widowarchy” of women who’d taken over their husbands’ estates and trading businesses. “And now her Husband is deceas’d, she thinks that upon the Setting of the Sun, the Moon is to govern,” grumbled Cotton Mather, another famous Puritan minister, who estimated that 20 percent of his congregation were widows.
If a husband failed to leave a will, a widow automatically got the use of one-third of his property during her lifetime. But she didn’t have the right to sell anything, and the situation probably got uncomfortable if there was an eager male heir or two watching her every move. The specificity of some wills did seem to foretell a generational clash in the making. Thomas King of Plymouth Colony willed his house to his son but decreed that his wife would have “the East End” along with “a liberty to make some use of the Cellars and and [sic] leantoos.” Beatrice Plummer of Newbury got “the new room, half the orchard, half the apples,” and a list of other items down to “a pewter pint pott, a paire of old curtaines & vallens.” One hopes there weren’t family fights over exactly how many apples constituted half.
We’re talking here about older women who had property. It seemed that nobody wanted the ones who didn’t. The deference and respect that elders received was frequently connected to the presumption that they came attached to a certain amount of wealth. There was nothing the colonials disliked more than a person who couldn’t make a contribution. In New Jersey, officials were instructed to search arriving ships to make sure there were no undesirables waiting to come ashore, like lunatics, vagabonds, or “old persons.” Indigent women were sometimes boarded off with members of the community, who might use them as housekeepers or farmworkers. If they were unable to work, there was usually some form of shelter available, like community almshouses. It might sound better than being driven homeless from town to town, but “to me a cave or a wigwam would be far preferable,” wrote one visitor to the Friends’ Widows Asylum in Pennsylvania. A Gloucester woman named Judith Stevens discovered her old tutor living in an almshouse in 1775 and described it as a “last resort of wretchedness.”
All this talk about widows brings us to Martha Washington, who went from wealthy widow to the first First Lady. In all of American history, she is perhaps the American who was most admired without ever being seriously discussed. She was first married at 18 to Daniel Parke Custis, whose father was one of the richest men in the colonies, and one of the most difficult. Martha managed to persuade the elder Custis—who had vetoed the marriage—that she was just what he needed in a daughter-in-law. She won the day with “a prudent speech,” a family friend reported.
By the time she was in her mid-20s, Martha was a widow—and an extremely rich one, running the vast Custis estates herself, and better than many of her male counterparts. (Colonial planters were often totally at sea when it came to turning a profit.) Many years later, she would urge her newly widowed niece to do everything possible “to keep all your matters in order yourself without depending on others as that is the only way to be happy to have all your business in your one [sic] hands.” Dependence, she added, was a “wrached” state. But when it came to her own life, Martha, like many other eighteenth-century American widows, ditched independence as soon as possible. She entertained suitors and decided that George Washington was the one. Despite the fact that George brought very little wealth into the union, her new husband instantly assumed full control over her property.
George was by many accounts a devoted mate, although he was deeply disappointed that the marriage was childless. Given the fact that Martha was still in her 20s when they wed and had already given birth to four babies, it’s likely that only George imagined fertility was her problem, and not his.
Only one of Martha’s children lived to adulthood, and when he, too, died, the Washingtons took over raising his young daughter and son. (This is an excellent opportunity to note that she nicknamed one grandchild, George Washington Parke Custis, both “Washy” and “Tub.”) When the Revolutionary War came, she was a loyal supporter of the cause—one of George’s colleagues reported that Martha talked to him and another man “like a Spartan mother to her son on going to battle.” During the winter months, she was always with her husband at Valley Forge or whatever other cold encampment the soldiers were hunkered down in. Unlike the rank and file, the officers and their families had fairly comfortable quarters, so Martha didn’t suffer from the weather. But she made herself useful, leading the other wives in projects like nursing the sick, sock knitting for the troops, and entertaining the staff and guests. One of the visitors was Elizabeth Drinker, attempting to get support for her exiled husband. Drinker found Martha “a sociable pretty kind of Woman” but referred to her dismissively as “Wife.”
Martha had definitely become the Wife. Visitors always praised her sociability and good conversation, but the public world hardly regarded her as a person to be reckoned with. Perhaps it was in part her stature. A short woman, Martha often had to get the attention of her rather lofty husband by tugging at his sleeve. Did she regret giving up her independence? She never said. She had reverted to a life of pure domestic responsibilities, which were many: they hosted several hundred guests a year, some of whom lingered for months. There were lots of servants to help with the housework when people arrived. But Martha was completely in charge of their entertainment. After dinner, George would retire to his ease in the library, leaving his wife to chat up the visitors in the drawing room. Almost everyone found her an agreeable conversationalist—except Thomas Jefferson, who thought Martha “rather weak” and possibly a little dim. This would be more notable if Thomas Jefferson had not been a terrible male chauvinist. He was the Founding Father who once warned his daughter not to go out without a bonnet “because it will make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much.”
By the time her husband became president, Martha was in her 50s and had graduated to the role of Older Woman. Even entertaining guests was no longer done on her terms. In an effort to show impartiality, George wanted social life limited to official events, like mass receptions and formal state dinners, which were universally described as soul deadening. There were also assemblies, when George danced but Martha didn’t. After one of the dinners, a senator from North Carolina reported that he had “the honor of drinking coffee with his Lady, a most amiable woman.” (George was apparently still fleeing to his study.) “If I live much longer,” the senator continued, “I believe I shall at last be reconciled to the company of old women… a circumstance which I once thought impossible.” At the time, Martha was 58 and the senator was 56. It was probably men like that who goaded the First Lady into saying, repeatedly, that the job of presidential wife should really go to someone “younger and gayer.”
The Washingtons’ retirement from public life was brief—George, whom Martha had begun calling “Old Man,” died at 67, less than three years after he left the presidency. The end came after a brief illness during which his doctors’ enthusiastic treatment deprived him of up to half of his body’s blood. Martha controlled the income from his estate, but this time she had no heart for business. She followed him soon after, dying at 70. Perhaps she was worn out from offering hospitality to the hordes of visitors who came to offer their condolences. “She speaks of death as a pleasant journey,” said a friend.
By the end of the colonial period there was no shortage of women, even in the south. “The fewer women the better,” wrote a Maryland man who hoped to import a boatload of indentured servants. Being older meant losing stature, too. The Revolutionary War seemed to embolden younger Americans to cast off the bounds of elder power as well as royal tyranny. While in the pre-revolutionary era people had tended to represent themselves as being older than they were, the tide turned and they veered toward pretending they were younger.
The idea that older people deserved the highest veneration may not always have been honored in practice during colonial times, but at least it was a general ideal. After independence, even the principle was questioned. Followers of the theologian John Wesley were warned that grandmothers needed to be reined in when it came to child-rearing. “Your mother, or your husband’s mother, may live with you; and you will do well to show her all possible respect. But let her on no account have the least share in the management of your children,” Wesley advised. “She would undo all that you had done; she would give them their own will in all things. She would humour them to the destruction of their souls if not their bodies.”
It was a change of attitude that had been coming on for some time. A new country that was founded by throwing off the yoke of authority was naturally going to be less enthusiastic about deferring to the older generation. Even the church seating arrangements stopped reflecting the idea that senior congregants deserved to sit in the front. By the end of the eighteenth century, the best seats were going to the richest members.